As the Greek debt crisis goes into extra time, the only consolation for German chancellor Angela Merkel is that her most vociferous bailout critics at home are in meltdown.
Two groups within the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party are locked in battle for control of the party, founded in 2013 as a Eurosceptic alternative to Germany’s mainstream parties.
From the start the AfD was a vocal critic of the EU’s bailout strategy and its European Stability Mechanism (ESM) bailout fund. It just missed reaching the 5 per cent electoral support it required to enter the Bundestag in the 2013 federal election.
Since then the party has entered five state parliaments and the European Parliament. But the success has now been superseded by bitter feuding, with the economic liberal camp around AfD founder Bernd Lucke facing a growing challenge from a conservative wing headed by the Saxony AfD leader, Frauke Petry.
The Petry camp believes that the AfD’s future lies in broadening its appeal by adopting conservative positions on law and order, immigration, cross-border crime and German identity.
Counter-movement
Alarmed, Lucke founded a counter-movement within the party, Wake-up Call 2015, to isolate Petry and squeeze her out of the party leadership. For Lucke, the Petry camp’s populist politics – including an alliance with Dresden’s anti-Islam Pegida movement – risk damaging the party’s image.
“The fundamental attitudes of these two groups are irreconcilable,” said Lucke, attacking the “anti-capitalist, German nationalist, anti-Islamic and anti-immigration forces” in Petry’s Saxon camp.
Petry and her allies, meanwhile, say they are frustrated by Lucke’s narrow focus on economic issues and by a dictatorial style they say is damaging the party.
Bitter feuding
The past few weeks have been marked by increasingly bitter feuding. The party was forced to cancel a mid-June party conference after possible irregularities regarding the election of party delegates in four states were revealed. That postponed plans to replace the current leadership trio – Lucke, Petry and
Konrad Adam
, another right-winger – with a duo, almost certainly Lucke and Petry.
Earlier this week, meanwhile, a party arbitration body ordered Lucke to dissolve his Wake-up Call 2015 grouping. While he has refused to accept the ruling, Petry was jubilant.
With party unity now in doubt, Petry departed on a fact-finding mission to Greece on Wednesday without informing her co-leader.
“For far too long we’ve only dealt with Greece from the desk,” she wrote in an email swipe at Lucke, an economics professor.
He hit back at her in a reply, mocking her failure to secure meetings with high-level partners on her trip.
For now there’s no end in sight for the standoff over how broad or narrow a policy platform the AfD needs to remain a long-term player in Germany’s political spectrum.
